Larry Kramer

Said and read – December 2020

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Oddly I didn’t read a single book in November and only read a few in October. But I ‘recovered‘ in December by reading an insane amount. As always, it’s not the amount that counts. Just read. Especially during these times. There is something for everyone in the written word and world.

“A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining.”” –Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor E Frankl

Previous book reports: 2020 – October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, January. 2019 – December, November, October, September, May, April, March, February, January. 2018 – November, October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February and January.

Thoughts on reading for December:

I liked a lot of the things I read in December, even if I would not recommend the majority of them. I include several here that struck me for personal reasons and not so much because I think they’d be universally appreciated.

Highly recommended

*Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor E Frankl

“The uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on his creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude.”

I had read Man’s Search for Meaning about three years ago at the suggestion of a friend. She sent me the book this year for Christmas, not knowing I’d read the book when she recommended it years earlier. But it’s the kind of slim volume that can and should be re-read.

It probably diminishes the value of the book to say that it could be an especially insightful thing to read in these soul-ravaging times, but I can think of very few books that can offer a guide for these fraught times. What other book teaches about human freedom and choice – our ability to choose to endure or even rise above suffering by choosing our own response to it?

“Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. And there were always choices to make.”

I have had many conversations of late with people who are each enduring their own forms of suffering, and it reminds me constantly that suffering is relative. It is, as Frankl writes, omnipresent in life, but we cannot know the size of another’s suffering. But in our own suffering or in helping to shepherd others through their suffering, we may identify the source of the suffering. When we name it, we can endure it because we can strive for something else when we give the source or form of our suffering a name.

“Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.”

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”

In choosing our path, we also find meaning. Frankl, in very few words, shows how meaning can encompass so many different aspects of human existence.

“My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn’t even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing—which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.”

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”

*And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic – Randy Shilts

“How very American, he thought, to look at a disease as homosexual or heterosexual, as if viruses had the intelligence to choose between different inclinations of human behavior.”

I watch and read almost everything that chronicles the history of the AIDS epidemic, and strangely had never read this lengthy and detailed (not to mention gripping) account of the appearance of this mysterious and devastating disease. I had seen the film version, which now strikes me as inadequate.

Sound reporting for the most part, aside from its turning flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas into a villain by falsely identifying him as “patient zero”. At the time of the book’s publication, the best science available would have traced many AIDS patients back to Dugas, but later epidemiological digging would discover earlier antecedents to Dugas.

Notably thorough, particularly for a time when virtually no one was writing about AIDS with the kind of attention Shilts paid, it’s an incredible history from which we continue to learn. It covers the inattention, indifference and lethal lack of care of the public and political spheres (Conant recalled, however, that this was the dean who also once observed, “At least with AIDS, a lot of undesirable people will be eliminated.”), how frightening and befuddling the disease itself was, the incredible toll the disease took on the first group it mortally wounded, the gay community, and introduced a cast of unforgettable characters, including public health officials, AIDS activists and writer Larry Kramer (who recently died).

I can’t capture 800 pages worth of in-depth reporting in a couple of sentences, but this is one of the most comprehensive and important books of the early AIDS crisis, and time has done nothing to dim its vitality in retelling the story we seem to be, as a society, forgetting.

*The Right Stuff – Tom Wolfe

“The military did not have very merciful instincts. Rather than packing up these poor souls and sending them home, the Navy, like the Air Force and the Marines, would try to make use of them in some other role, such as flight controller. So the washout was to keep taking classes with the rest of his group, even though he can no longer touch an airplane. He sits thee in the classes staring at sheets of paper with cataracts of sheer human mortification over his eyes while the rest steal looks at him… this man reduced to an ant, this untouchable, this poor sonofabitch. And in what test had he been found wanting? Why, it seemed to be nothing less than manhood itself.”

Having joked for years that my dad is Ed Harris (they sort of look alike), it’s hard not to then extend that to one of Ed Harris’s iconic roles, astronaut and US senator, John Glenn. I received a copy of The Right Stuff as a gift, an in-joke nod to this connection, the giver claiming I could finally get to know my dad better through his biography.

“…men who were the bearers and protectors of the most important values of American life, who maintained a sense of discipline while civilians abandoned themselves to hedonism, who maintained a sense of honor while civilians lived by opportunism and greed. Opportunism and greed: there you had your much-vaunted corporate business world. Khrushchev was right about one thing: when it came time to hang the capitalist West, an American businessman would sell him the rope. When the showdown came – and the showdowns always came – not all the wealth in the world or all the sophisticated nuclear weapons and radar and missile systems it could buy would take the place of those who had the uncritical willingness to face danger, those who, in short, had the right stuff.”

I started reading the book (having seen the film about a million times, which is of course how Ed Harris is so inextricably tied to John Glenn) the day before Chuck Yeager, who was arguably the hero of this book, died.

The book was beautifully written and captured the embryonic moments of the US space program and the competition with the Soviets but almost as a backdrop to the incipient and groundbreaking (or maybe “sound breaking” would be a more apt description) work Yeager did as a test pilot. A great deal of descriptive nuance is lost in the film (although I’d argue the film is also a classic, for different reasons. I liked having the visual image of the actors from the film in mind when I read the book).

And, in the shadow of Yeager’s death, a fitting tribute to Yeager and his apparently infectious, folksy, Appalachian drawl and how pilots ever since have sought to imitate it:

“’Pygmalion in reverse’: “It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.”

*The Nightfields – Joanna Klink

Poetry as always.

*I’ll Fly Away – Rudy Francisco

Another collection of poetry from one of my recent favorites.

Useful, interesting and otherwise positive

*Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World – Carl T. Bergstrom

I’d have loved to read this when I was studying full-time – it is a great book to read any time to begin to unravel the skewed way we interpret data and statistics, eating them up as prepared. And the truth is they are prepared and fed to the tastes of the person feeding them to us.

It called to mind a book I read back in July, Rigor Mortis, about how bad/sloppy science is not only contributing to the replicability/reproducibility crisis but also wastes money, time and leads to bad conclusions that end up interpreted or used in media or other research that leads nowhere. Sharpening the BS radar, as Calling Bullshit calls for, and changing some of the particularities of academic and scientific journal publishing practice, could help alleviate this problem.

Whether you just want to understand a bit better how to critically interrogate the provenance or veracity of something you’ve read in a news article or need to think more deeply about scientific claims made in research, this is a great book to revisit often for practical how-to tactics to debunk junk claims, misleading “facts” and interpretations, and general BS. We need this kind of thing more than ever. While everyone can use it, it would be a heck of a lot more powerful if the people who need it most would read it.

*All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood – Jennifer Senior

Not much to say about this book except that it won’t surprise anyone that rearing children is difficult, expensive, and has become, if we follow Senior’s logic, asymmetrical.

“Over time, reformers managed to outlaw child labor practices. Yet change was slow. It wasn’t until our soldiers returned from World War II that childhood, as we now know it, began. The family economy was no longer built on a system of reciprocity, with parents sheltering and feeding their children, and children, in return, kicking something back into the family till. The relationship became asymmetrical. Children stopped working, and parents worked twice as hard. Children went from being our employees to our bosses.”

Mostly we see how children went from being useful to almost like being an all-consuming project. Senior touches on some of the important stuff about how rearing children outside the US, in European countries for example, is a very different enterprise, as governments usually guarantee protection for employees who take time off to have children, subsidize childcare and healthcare is universal, erasing some of the biggest worries atop parents’ minds. Having a child in Scandinavia, for example, is a good deal less… stressful than in America. Sure, it’s still hard, but all those external stresses are alleviated so parents can focus on being parents and people (individuals outside of parenthood).

*The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris – Mark Honigsbaum

“Unless and until we take account of the ecological, immunological, and behavioural factors that govern the emergence and spread of novel pathogens, our knowledge of such microbes and their connection to disease is bound to be partial and incomplete.”

I am on board with reading as many books like this as I can. I don’t know why I devour them. You’d think they would seem scarier under the thumb of Covid. But I feel like trying to get a better understanding of the history of identifying disease is comforting.

“Indeed, by the 1940s Burnet was worrying that these spillover events were becoming more common and that overpopulation, coupled with international trade and jet travel, was disrupting natural ecologies in new and unpredictable ways, leading to virulent outbreaks of vector-borne diseases such as yellow fever. While a world in which everyone and everything was more closely linked in a biological sense should favour a ‘virtual equilibrium’ between humans and microbial parasites, Burnet warned that “man… lives in an environment constantly being changed by his own activities, and few of his diseases have attained such equilibrium.”

*A Promised Land – Barack Obama

Obama is a good writer, and it was comforting in some way to go back to this more innocent time. It feels like a million years ago. And it wasn’t innocent. It was just filled with complete sentences.

Even good writers, though, benefit from good editors, a point Obama himself concedes early on in this overly long book. But who is going to tell Barack Obama that he needs to shave off a couple hundred pages? Especially when he recounts with precise detail how offended he felt when others were cutting lines from a speech long ago, before he was the US president.

If you’re someone who has read his other books and Michelle Obama’s Becoming, much of this will also feel like you’re treading old ground that he didn’t need to include here. But plenty of people will appreciate the level of detail about the past he introduces.

*Death is Hard Work – Khaled Khalifa

“Surrendering to one’s memories is the best way of escaping the wounds they preserve; constant repetition robs them of their brilliance and sanctity.”

Khalifa is a Syrian writer whose work brings the day-to-day struggles and tragedy in Syria into stark view. In this brief novel, an old man dies in Damascus and has tasked his son with completing his last wish: to be buried in the family plot in Anabiya.

Yet with war raging all around, roadblocks impeding the supposedly two-hour drive between Damascus and Anabiya, the son enlists his siblings to help him achieve his father’s final wish. This book tells the tale of that harrowing and perilous journey.

““Tend to the living—the dead are already gone.” He didn’t like it, however, because of how often the line was quoted by cowards justifying retreat. And in any case, today it might be a different matter—better to tend to the dead; after all, they now outnumbered the living. He went on to muse that they would all surely be dead in the not-too-distant future. This thought had given him exceptional courage over the previous four years. Not only had it served to increase his stoicism day by day, but he was far better able to withstand the many insults he received from checkpoint soldiers and Mukhabarat in the course of his work if he bore this thought in mind, since it allowed him to subscribe to the view that anyone who gave him a hard time would probably be dead today or tomorrow, or by next month at the latest. Not that this was a particularly pleasant notion, but it was an accurate one, and each citizen had to live under the shadow of this understanding. The inhabitants of the city regarded everyone they saw as not so much “alive” as “pre-dead.” It gave them a little relief from their frustration and anger.”

*Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

*Gulag – Anne Applebaum

I’ve only recently discovered Applebaum, which is odd considering my long ‘relationship’ with studying eastern Europe and Russia. Still, I’ve stumbled onto her work as a result of her recent book, Twilight of Democracy, which completes a journey through (relatively) newly authoritarian regimes in Poland and Hungary, the inward-looking, xenophobic English (and mercifully Applebaum makes the critical distinction that it is an English obsession, not a Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish one) drive toward the disaster that is Brexit, and finally the Trump-in-America phenomenon.

I enjoyed Twilight of Democracy, but not quite as much as I had expected. Perhaps because I’d read Sarah Kendzior’s Hiding in Plain Sight and Masha Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy first. Even though Applebaum has different expertise and her own voice, I was put off by her tendency to write exceptionally long and not particularly succinct sentences. I have always been (rightly) criticized for my own long sentences, and I have yet to read another writer in modern literature who gets away with it. And, even though Applebaum’s long sentences made it through editing, I wouldn’t say she “gets away with it” because greater concision would have made Twilight of Democracy a better book. This is, though, a minor complaint because it is a good book. Just not as good as it might have been.

Her other works, especially Gulag, are better. The diligence of her research is clear – and she exposes a great deal of hitherto unavailable information about the history of the Gulag system. When I told someone I was reading a book about the Gulag system, he asked incredulously, “System?!” Which makes Applebaum’s point:

“Yet although they lasted as long as the Soviet Union itself, and although many millions of people passed through them, the true history of the Soviet Union’s concentration camps was, until recently, not at all well known. By some measures, it is still not known. Even the bare facts recited above, although by now familiar to most Western scholars of Soviet history, have not filtered into Western popular consciousness. “Human knowledge,” once wrote Pierre Rigoulot, the French historian of communism, “doesn’t accumulate like the bricks of a wall, which grows regularly, according to the work of the mason. Its development, but also its stagnation or retreat, depends on the social, cultural and political framework.”

*Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill – Robert Whitaker

“I soon stumbled upon two research findings that didn’t fit with what I knew. First, in a 1994 article, Harvard Medical School researchers had reported that outcomes for schizophrenia patients had worsened during the past twenty years. Schizophrenia patients were now faring no better than they had in 1900, when various water therapies—needle showers and prolonged baths—were the preferred treatments of the day. Second, the World Health Organization had twice found that schizophrenia outcomes in the United States and other developed countries were much worse than those in the poor countries of the world. Suffer a psychotic break in a poor country like India or Nigeria, and chances were that in a couple of years you would be doing fairly well. But suffer a similar break in the United States or another developed country, and it was likely that you would become chronically ill.”

A damning exploration of the treatment of schizophrenia in America, and society’s inability first to see patients as people and second to appropriately understand the damage done by the litany of dangerous treatments lauded as “cures”. Whether blunt surgical butchery, electroshock therapy or highly toxic medication, the efficacy of most of the treatments administered in the United States was never established, and in most cases, patients ended up much worse off.

*The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom – H.W. Brands

“The work wasn’t finished. The work of freedom never would be.”

This was one of those times I had to “nerd out” and email the author to say thanks because this book breathed fresh life into historical figures and events, which is something that always causes my heart to flutter a bit. This volume comes around at a time that lets it coincide with the raucous, much-lauded limited series, The Good Lord Bird, which certainly will act as a springboard for deeper investigation of the real people and stories that make up the actual historical record.

“The hanging was not the end of John Brown but a new beginning. Brown’s parting testament shortly surfaced, scribbled on a scrap of paper passed to a sympathetic guard before he left the jail. “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood,” he declared. The dreadful forecast made the martyr into a prophet as well.”

“Lincoln himself had raised the issue of blood atonement in his second inaugural address. Now his own blood was part of the reckoning, and his link to John Brown more compelling. Brown had foretold blood atonement while becoming one of the first sacrifices; Lincoln at the time had resisted the concept for his country and scarcely imagined it for himself. But he made decisions whose consequences included a bloodletting far greater than anything Brown had envisioned, and finally his own death. Brown was a first martyr in the war that freed the slaves, Lincoln one of the last.”

I’m partial to anything that leads people to investigate further. In this case, the book also raises points that are as relevant today as when Brown and Lincoln lived.

“THE QUESTION HAD BEEN: What does a good man do when his country commits a great evil? John Brown chose the path of violence, Lincoln of politics. Yet the two paths wound up leading to the same place: the most terrible war in American history. Brown aimed at slavery and shattered the Union; Lincoln defended the Union and destroyed slavery.”

*His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life – Jonathan Alter

A misunderstood US president who has long been dogged by labels that he was one of America’s worst presidents. His long post-presidential life has enabled a reassessment of sorts, particularly as the man has devoted his life to doing good in the world.

Was Carter’s presidency as “bad” as it is often remembered? The book makes a compelling case that it certainly wasn’t – but Carter was a bit thin-skinned, a bit too honest and forthright, a true non-politician in the sense that he had neither the dishonesty or charisma to propel him to the inspirational heights that wholly unqualified individuals like Ronald Reagan reached.

*This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences – Sarah E. Hill

I am not sure how to characterize why this book was a disappointment to me. It’s not that it was bad or unreadable. It’s not that the subject matter isn’t fascinating in its own way. It’s just… I don’t know what. Still there are useful questions posed.

“Treating the pill as the big deal that it is will require a major course adjustment for all of us. We’ve all been far too cavalier about making changes to women’s sex hormones. And if you need evidence of this, consider for a moment the differences in the way we treat birth control pills and anabolic steroids, those drugs favored by athletes who don’t mind cheating to win. The primary ingredient in steroids is a synthetic version of the primary male sex hormone, testosterone. These synthetics work by stimulating testosterone receptors and getting cells to run their testosterone program. This causes the body to experience changes like increased muscle mass, skin breakouts, and the magnification of certain male-like behavioral traits (like bar fighting and wall punching). Now, as you are probably well aware, anabolic steroids are illegal without a prescription. They are classified as a Schedule III controlled substance and—if you’re caught with them—you’re looking at a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison. Steroids, because they stimulate hormone receptors, have a wide range of effects on men’s bodies and brains. When taken over long periods of time, these changes can be bad for men’s health. Given that men might want to take them anyway, steroids are illegal without a prescription, in an attempt to discourage steroid use in the service of public health. Are you starting to sense the irony? We worry about men using artificial sex hormones because of all the effects they have on the body. At the same time, women are routinely prescribed female sex hormones and kept on them for years at a time despite all the effects that they have on the body. We are willing to turn a blind eye to all the ways the pill can change women because we simply can’t entertain going back to living in a world where women don’t have control over their fertility. And we shouldn’t have to.”

Disappointing reads

*Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World – Tom Burgis

“Compliance officers had been around for a while but following a procession of corporate scandals – Enron, WorldCom and the rest – they became ubiquitous, the designated conscience of big business. In practice, what compliance officers at banks usually did was attempt to swathe the organisation in a veil of rectitude without restricting bankers’ moneymaking in any meaningful way.”

I thought this was going to be an exciting book, and whether I was just not in the mood for it, or it was just that boring, I could barely get through it. I may revisit it later.

“For an oligarch seeking safety there was one option so bold that you might have thought it would be difficult. First, turn yourself into a corporation: one of the most powerful fictions in which Westerners chose to believe, endowed with privileges and protections, and yet blissfully easy to create. Second, add to that corporation the assets Nazarbayev had allowed you to acquire – mines, banks, whatever. Then sell a share of your corporation for Western money.”

Probably the best part of the book was the strategic deployment of quotes from other people:

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.” –Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Said and read – April 2020

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“What would it be like if a Level 4 virus event occurred and the Ancient Rule arrived in the supercity of New York? It wouldn’t take much to produce the Ancient Rule in New York City. A dry virus with high mortality that infects people through the lungs. No vaccine, no medical treatment for the virus. If you take the subway, if you ride in an elevator, you can be infected, too. If the Ancient Rule came to New York City, we can imagine people lying face down on the street or in Central Park, crowds staring and hanging back. People begging for help, no one willing to help. Police officers wearing full PPE gear. People needing ambulances. No ambulances. Hospitals gone medieval. Medical staff absent, dying, overwhelmed. All hospital beds full. People being turned away on the street from Bellevue Hospital. Medical examiner facilities gone hot as hell and crammed with corpses.” –Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come – Richard Preston

Image courtesy of S Donaghy

What kinds of things defined April for you? Budgets cut, marriages ended, and we wonder… how many of these things were hastened – how many would have happened at all – if we had been distracted by all the things that normally make up our daily lives? Do we live more authentically in an era when we are forced to have no other distractions? Do we succumb to identity crises because so many of us were defined by the things we did that kept us busy? Is it painful that now, perhaps, we face our unvarnished selves for the first time without the filter of all those intermediary people and acts?

Life slowed down in April, affording me the ability to read an unthinkable amount. And as always, it was richly varied – some exceptional, some disappointing, some timely, some timeless.

We remain in the limbo of not knowing where the COVID-19 virus will take us, “guided” by leadership that, at best, leaves much to be desired. During these April weeks, I have – for some reason – read various books about epidemics, pandemics, epidemiology and a variety of other seemingly unrelated topics, such as economics and politics. Before this pandemic, I had rarely, if ever, heard the name “Anthony Fauci“, in much the same way that you don’t expect to be familiar with the names of public servants who aren’t, for example, presidents, prime ministers or cabinet-level ministers. Yet, suddenly, Fauci was everywhere. In a Larry Kramer documentary, and several books I read about the AIDS crisis, the Ebola crisis… and any book that mentions the NIH/NIAID.

In the end everything is interrelated. The more I read, obviously the more connections I find. So many books from both the near and distant past warn us of impending crises of all kinds. It’s hard to read these and know what to do; helplessness is paralyzing.

Here’s what you missed in previous years: 2020 – March, February, January. 2019 – December, November, October, September, May, April, March, February, January. 2018 – November, October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February and January.

Thoughts on reading for April:

Highly recommended

“I don’t remember a time when I felt safe in America, but I remember when I thought it was possible I would be, someday. The nostalgia for what never was is a familiar feeling for those born in the opening salvo in the symphony of American decline.” –Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America – Sarah Kendzior

*Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America – Sarah Kendzior

“One of the most horrific realizations when your government is hijacked from the inside is that there is no official to whom you can turn—because it is rare to find an official who cannot be turned by a corrupt operator. Living for legacy, living for security, living for money—it makes no difference, they are not living for you. There had been a coup, and we were on our own.”

All I can say about Hiding in Plain Sight is that you must read it.

“What Americans rejected in 2016 was not trust but discernment. A criminal can bury the truth in a conspiracy because no one will believe it except those accustomed to parsing absurdities, who are then mocked as insane.”

To understand more about how we got here (in part because “American exceptionalism—the widespread belief that America is unique among nations and impervious to autocracy—is the delusion that paved Trump’s path to victory”) you must also read Kendzior’s earlier book, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America.

“The only honest line of Trump’s campaign was that America was broken. Trump would know: he helped break it, and now he and his backers sought to capitalize off the wreckage. Trump did not strike me as stupid, like pundits kept proclaiming, but as a master manipulator who preyed on pain like a vulture.”

While you’re at it, you also need to invest time in the Gaslit Nation podcast, also brought to us by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. Both Kendzior and Chalupa present their hard-won expertise, analysis and insight, which emerge from their backgrounds in academic and journalistic research. That is, the real kind of research – not the “I looked at the internet and found something to support my beliefs” kind we now blindly accept as we devalue education, expertise in specific disciplines, journalistic integrity, historical accuracy and truth. Kendzior’s area of expertise is in authoritarian states/dictatorships (this is, again, simplifying it), while Chalupa is a writer and journalist.

“I took a picture of an anti-Trump protester holding a sign that said THE BANALITY OF EVIL—a reference to Hannah Arendt, the philosopher who said of life under the Nazi regime: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” The Trump rally was a study in how people capable of compassion can turn cruel in response to the rhetoric of their chosen leader or in retaliation to those who dare oppose him.”

““You were right two years ago, but this isn’t going to be Nixon. This is American authoritarianism, and they are going to tell us ‘That’s not possible’ until nothing else is.””

None of what Kendzior has predicted (repeatedly) will seem unfamiliar to you in hindsight. Much of it may seem unbelievable when reflected upon, but we’ve been on the slippery slope, being primed for this nightmare for a long time.

“In 2002, Ron Suskind, a journalist for The New York Times, interviewed a Bush administration official later identified as adviser Karl Rove. Suskind recalls: [Rove] said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.””

“This uncritical embrace of authority for its own sake is similar to the excuses given for the refusal of officials to address the attacks on the 2016 election in depth. (The Russians want us to distrust the integrity of the US election process, the pundit explains, therefore we must never, ever question what the Russians did to the election process!) The trustworthiness of a process or person was to be dictated from above by “history’s actors,” not decreed from below by the empirical observations of the masses. What Rove did in that interview—and what Trump does now—was take the ruse one step further, and admit to manipulation openly, not even giving the public the illusion of an honest broker.”

“This is not boldness: crime ceases to be risky when you know you will get away with it. In the twenty-first century, the corporate loopholes that enable white-collar crime double as nooses around the neck of Western democracy. In the Reagan era, Trump’s Republican backers helped devise the dissolution of corporate regulations. In the Bush era, they chipped away at political checks and balances, with the near elimination of accountability as a result. The Republican party provided the structure for an American autocracy enabled by corporate corruption. But it was television producers who gave the future autocrat his most important script.”

I could go on. Instead, you must read the book.

““In fall 2016, I said to a friend, “I don’t know who has it worse—the people who understand what is going to happen, or the people who don’t.” Her answer was simple: “Neither of them: it’s the kids.” For the past four years, I have been taking my children on road trips around America, in the event of its demise. This compulsion began in September 2016, when I became certain that American authoritarianism loomed. National landmarks that I had long taken for granted seemed newly vulnerable to destruction or desecration. It was important to me that my kids see America with their own eyes, and not through mine. I want my children to have their own memories of the United States, so that if they’re confronted with a false version years from now, they can say, “No, I saw it. We had that. This was real. That America was real.””

*Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-century Economist – Kate Raworth

“…whenever I hear someone praising the ‘free market’, I beg them to take me there because I’ve never seen it at work in any country that I have visited.”

Doughnut Economics would have been an important book about how to think about and reform economics at any time. In this particular moment, which could be a crossroads, it is a vital contribution to rethinking what economics is and can be.

“‘As markets reach into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms, the notion that markets don’t touch or taint the goods they exchange becomes increasingly implausible,’ warns Sandel. ‘Markets are not mere mechanisms; they embody certain values. And sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket norms worth caring about.’”

“One thing that is clearly coming to an end is the credibility of general equilibrium economics. Its metaphors and models were devised to mimic Newtonian mechanics, but the pendulum of prices, the market mechanism and the reliable return to rest are simply not suited to understanding the economy’s behaviour. Why not? It’s just the wrong kind of science.”

“From this perspective, the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the imminent collapse of the Greenland ice sheet have much in common. All three are reported in the news as sudden events but are actually visible tipping points that result from slowly accumulated pressure in the system—be it the gradual build-up of political protest in Eastern Europe, the build-up of sub-prime mortgages in a bank’s asset portfolio or the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

“This should set the alarm bells ringing: in the early twenty-first century, we have transgressed at least four planetary boundaries, billions of people still face extreme deprivation and the richest 1 percent own half of the world’s financial wealth. These are ideal conditions for driving ourselves towards collapse. If we are to avoid such a fate for our global civilisation, we clearly need a transformation, and it can be summed up like this: Today’s economy is divisive and degenerative by default. Tomorrow’s economy must be distributive and regenerative by design. An economy that is distributive by design is one whose dynamics…”

When I took up the formal study of economics more than 20 years ago, I ran into walls  – walls that have grown taller and thicker over time. Mostly this is because, when I started, I was more willing to accept, as Raworth describes it, economics’ “long-established theories”, rather than the more sensible and just “humanity’s long-term goals”. It did not occur to me until I was, as Raworth also describes, deep in the abyss of trying to understand accepted theory, that there might be another way.

“I was so busy getting to grips with the theory of demand and supply, so determined to get my head around the many definitions of money, that I did not spot the hidden values that had occupied the economic nest. Though claiming to be value-free, conventional economic theory cannot escape the fact that value is embedded at its heart: it is wrapped up with the idea of utility, which is defined as a person’s satisfaction or happiness gained from consuming a particular bundle of goods.”

“It was only when I opted to study what was at the time an obscure topic—the economics of developing countries—that the question of goals popped up. The very first essay question that I was set confronted me head-on: What is the best way of assessing success in development? I was gripped and shocked. Two years into my economic education and the question of purpose had appeared for the first time. Worse, I hadn’t even realised that it had been missing. Twenty-five years later, I wondered if the teaching of economics had moved on by recognising the need to start with a discussion of what it is all for.”

How can future economists reclaim and reframe what economic success and progress look like, and espouse a way of “economic thinking that would enable us to achieve” and meet humanity’s needs and goals? Now more than ever, as unemployment numbers reach record territory, and when “full employment” doesn’t reflect the number of people in more than full-time employment who nevertheless live in poverty, how can we redefine economic prosperity to encompass human well-being instead of by impenetrable and meaningless GDP and stock market figures?

“And so, over half a century, GDP growth shifted from being a policy option to a political necessity and the de facto policy goal. To enquire whether further growth was always desirable, necessary, or indeed possible became irrelevant, or political suicide.”

“Donella Meadows—one of the lead authors of the 1972 Limits to Growth report—and she didn’t mince her words. ‘Growth is one of the stupidest purposes ever invented by any culture,’…”.

“response to the constant call for more growth, she argued, we should always ask: ‘growth of what, and why, and for whom, and who pays the cost, and how long can it last, and what’s the cost to the planet, and how much is enough?’

I am oversimplifying this book, and haven’t even mentioned its analysis or prescriptions. I would recommend that you read this if you have an abiding interest in economic justice and how we might reverse the trend of thinking about market norms as norms, placing human and societal needs as less important. In a consumer-oriented society, which is where we live, we aren’t taught to question the primacy of the market and its “health”, but this is akin to brainwashing.

This has been clear for a long time, but it takes extraordinary circumstances, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate how exploitative, fragile and short-sighted the current system is. Whom does it serve? Who really enables it? Raworth writes extensively about the invisible and unpaid “core economy” – the labor of the household, of rearing children, etc. This labor has been removed from the equation. During times of crisis (like now), however, the veil is lifted and its supremacy as the foundation of all that becomes possible in the market is elevated – or at least obvious, even if briefly.

“…And since work in the core economy is unpaid, it is routinely undervalued and exploited, generating lifelong inequalities in social standing, job opportunities, income and power between women and men.”

“By largely ignoring the core economy, mainstream economics has also overlooked just how much the paid economy depends upon it. Without all that cooking, washing, nursing and sweeping, there would be no workers—today or in the future—who were healthy, well-fed and ready for work each morning. As the futurist Alvin Toffler liked to ask at smart gatherings of business executives, ‘How productive would your workforce be if it hadn’t been toilet trained?’”

“Why does it matter that this core economy should be visible in economics? Because the household provision of care is essential for human well-being, and productivity in the paid economy depends directly upon it. It matters because when—in the name of austerity and public sector savings—governments cut budgets for children’s daycare centres, community services, parental leave and youth clubs, the need for care-giving doesn’t disappear: it just gets pushed back into the home.”

*Indigo – Ellen Bass

Poetry, of course.

*Ledger: Poems – Jane Hirshfield

Poetry.

*The Carrying – Ada Limón

Poetry.

*The Story of a New Name – Elena Ferrante

““You’re back,” I said. “Yes.” “Why didn’t you tell me?” “I didn’t want you to see me.” “Others can see you and not me?” “I don’t care about others, I do care about you.” I looked at her uncertainly. What was I not supposed to see?”

The Neapolitan quartet of novels offers an extended and intimate view into the life of a friendship and its lifetime of ups and downs. Whether or not you’re impressed, I’ve found Ferrante’s writing so lifelike that it swarms around me before settling and insisting that I immerse myself in the relationship she describes, which is at once personal and unique while also being universal. I’ve written before about the first of the four books and how exquisitely it probes the twists of girlhood/adolescent friendship. I didn’t find myself as sucked in by the subsequent books in the series, but it’s easy to dismiss the exceptionally good because its genius appears to be so effortless.

“She loved him, she loved him like the girls in the photonovels. For her whole life she would sacrifice to him every quality of her own, and he wouldn’t even be aware of the sacrifice, he would be surrounded by the wealth of feeling, intelligence, imagination that were hers, without knowing what to do with them, he would ruin them. I, I thought, am not capable of loving anyone like that, not even Nino, all I know is how to get along with books.”

Good – or better than expected

*The Witches are Coming – Lindy West

“When faced with a choice between an incriminating truth or a flattering lie, America’s ruling class has been choosing the lie for four hundred years. White Americans hunger for plausible deniability and swaddle themselves in it and always have—for the sublime relief of deferred responsibility, the soft violence of willful ignorance, the barbaric fiction of rugged individualism.”

On initial reading, I didn’t find West’s The Witches are Coming particularly compelling. I don’t think I rated it too highly on my Goodreads page (I wouldn’t put too much stock in these kinds of ratings in any case. I count myself fickle on this front; what struck me as readable but not terribly insightful later strikes me as offering a striking voice. It’s a matter of mood that determines how everything is received and assessed).

When I read West’s book, I don’t think I was adequately enraged by the world we live in. I live cocooned in a remote self-(near)-exile in a forest. Rage, and the injustices that lead to justified rage, is hard to come by. But as the handling of coronavirus has unfolded, and incompetent white men bungle it, lie about it, and put power above life – particularly those lives disproportionately affected by the effects of the virus – my anger has risen.

It’s impossible to divorce oneself from the reality of how we got here. West channels much of this into her writing here, whether it is in her being “so fucking sick—FUCKING VIOLENTLY ILL” of watching good people be conned or her takedown of the sick lionization of serial killers by white cisgender men, i.e. ““Straight, white, cisgender men love to file serial killers under some darker subcategory of white male genius. It’s easier to be titillated when fear is an abstraction.” (I hadn’t really thought much about this enduring fascination with/analysis of serial killers, but West is absolutely right.)

This concoction of going back to the book to read West’s words and the circumstances in which we now find ourselves… thanks to our own “bootstrap ethos (itself just a massive grift to empower the snickering rich)” that cause me to reassess. We are in deep shit and blithely rolling around in it like we can’t smell it.

*I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution – Emily Nussbaum

“Yet there’s a level at which I can’t entirely explain my adoration for television, my sense of it as not subject matter but a cause. There was something alive about the medium to me, organic in a way that other art is not. You enter into it; you get changed with it; it changes with you. I like movies, but I’m not a cinephile; you’ll never catch me ululating about camera technique, for better or worse. I love books, but I have little desire to review them. Television was what did it for me. For two decades, as the medium moved steadily from the cultural margins to its hot center, it was where I wanted to live.”

As a would-be reformed television addict who is also uncooperative with myself and the limits I’ve set for tv viewing, I relate to Emily Nussbaum’s writing. Her defense of television as a dynamic art form makes me wonder why I’ve been so obstinate in my pursuit of severing the relationship (healthy or not) I’ve developed with televisual entertainment.

Unlike Nussbaum, I am not a tv critic – I am not a critic of any kind. As Nussbaum declares, though, television is a medium worth evaluating and criticizing. It can delve into questions and debates about values. It can reflect the values (divided though they might be) of a society, and chronicle their changing face. Consider how quaint the Dan Quayle–Murphy Brown kerfuffle about single parenthood and “family values” now feels in some ways, given how the shape of our television-like (so-called because so much of it now is not made for TV specifically) entertainment has expanded to become more inclusive and, as stated, has veered away from the limitations and restrictions of network TV screens into new media. (Which has also pushed at least some of network television to become more creative.)

At the same time, though, have we moved so far away from that ‘moral’ debate, when debates continue to rage about (as a starting point) women’s bodies, access to birth control and abortion? Our entertainment is a mirror, and the reflection we see is changing all the time.

“Back when no one believed they were in a Golden Age, Lear shrugged off the way that his native medium had always been “a convenient whipping boy” for American malaise. It was the networks who thought small, he argued, and who were condescending to their viewers: “I’ve never seen anything I thought was too good for the American people or so far above them that they’d never reach for it if they had the chance.” To Lear, TV was still all potential, particularly an untapped potential for variety—it just needed to “replace imitation with originality as the formula for success.” He envisions cross-medium experiments: “How do they know there wouldn’t be as large an audience for a John Cheever or a Ray Bradbury drama as there is for a Norman Lear or a Mary Tyler Moore show?””

Nussbaum has captured here what I have long tried to articulate when people question my devotion to tv viewing. Criticism of other art forms – poetry, literature, cinema – is accepted, respected and “more difficult”. But Nussbaum argues, television criticism is valid and legitimate – and in her case (and this would be true for me, too), she didn’t feel a strong enough desire or pull to dedicate herself to any other field with the kind of rigor needed to be a serious critic or writer.

Nussbaum offered a lot to dig into, but I’ll highlight here (but may discuss elsewhere later) a couple of things I loved.

First, the Law & Order: SVU character Rafael Barba. So sorely missed. (It was a pleasure to see him turn up in a recent episode of The Good Fight):

“None of the new cast members has quite his magnetism, although the Broadway star Raúl Esparza is a major asset as the dandyish ADA Rafael Barba. “Objection!” Barba announces, when someone accuses Benson of being a man-hater. “Argumentative. And ridiculous.””

Second, The Americans.

“The Americans refuses to do what similar cable shows have done, even some of the good ones: offer a narcotic, adventurous fantasy in which we get to imagine being the smartest person in the room, the only one free…”

I am still surprised when I meet people who have (inexcusably) never even heard of this. The few people I’ve convinced to watch it always return to me blown away by it, but it is, as Nussbaum explains, “a must-watch and a hard sell”.

“The Americans is a bleak show that ends each episode with heartbreak. It’s also a thrilling, moving, clever show about human intimacy—possibly the best current drama out there (at least of the ones I’ve been able to keep up with). Dread is its specialty and also its curse; it’s what makes The Americans at once a must-watch and a hard sell. This is a surprising conundrum because, judging by a plot summary…”

*Lost Children Archive – Valeria Luiselli

“But surely it was not that day, in that supermarket, that I understood what was happening to us. Beginnings, middles, and ends are only a matter of hindsight. If we are forced to produce a story in retrospect, our narrative wraps itself selectively around the elements that seem relevant, bypassing all the others.”

What makes a relationship – a marriage – solid but malleable enough to withstand change? Luiselli explores the difficulties of marriage – or being generous in a marriage in the long-term – and considers the unforeseen, sometimes invisible, ways that connections erode. That’s how erosion works – you don’t know something is slipping away underneath you until you fall. A foundation is slowly worn away, imperceptibly. When that foundation lacks strength in the first place, e.g., if one of your strongest bonds was a work project that ended, what remains for you as a couple? I suspect this happens in celebrity relationships that are reported in tabloids and fizzle out in mere months. How else to explain?

“The thing about living with someone is that even though you see them every day and can predict all their gestures in a conversation, even when you can read intentions behind their actions and calculate their responses to circumstances fairly accurately, even when you are sure there’s not a single crease in them left unexplored, even then, one day, the other can suddenly become a stranger.”

When the close intensity of working together for a brief time sweeps one away, what remains when the project is over? That will, Luiselli seems to argue, be the test.

“Without a future professional project together, we began to drift apart in other ways. I guess we—or perhaps just I—had made the very common mistake of thinking that marriage was a mode of absolute commonality and a breaking down of all boundaries, instead of understanding it simply as a pact between two people willing to be the guardians of each other’s solitude, as Rilke or some other equanimous, philosophical soul had long ago prescribed.”

“I don’t keep a journal. My journals are the things I underline in books. I would never lend a book to anyone after having read it. I underline too much, sometimes entire pages, sometimes with double underline. My husband and I once read this copy of Sontag’s journals together. We had just met. Both of us underlined entire passages of it, enthusiastically, almost feverishly. We read out loud, taking turns, opening the pages as if consulting an oracle, legs naked and intertwined on a twin bed. I suppose that words, timely and arranged in the right order, produce an afterglow. When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion.”

An odd overlap: Luiselli writes about a roadtrip throughout the book, and in Kendzior’s aforementioned book, she chronicles her desperate need to share America’s landscapes with her children before they disappear, to bear witness to the America that once was. It’s haunting, in some ways, how these travelogue accounts both create a sense of impending loss, a disappearing world. For Kendzior, it is as vast as the country she has always known as home. For Luiselli, it is the intimacy of family life.

“More and more, my presence here, on this trip with my family, driving toward a future we most probably won’t share, settling into motel bedrooms for the night, feels ghostly, a life witnessed and not lived. I know I’m here, with them, but also I am not.”

*There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice through Jewish Law and Tradition – Jill Jacobs

April was a month to explore Judaism in greater depth thanks to a reading list I found via the Twitter account of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. I read an extensive list of the recommended books, and this will continue throughout the year. I mention it now  because I enjoyed the way Rabbi Jacobs presented an interpretation of Jewish law and tradition that does not just make room for social justice and alleviation of poverty – but insists on it.

“Within Judaism, support for the poor is understood as an obligation and as a means of restoring justice to the world, and not as an altruistic or voluntary gesture.”

We are living in a moment in which extraordinary need has become immediately apparent. And how are governments dealing with it, as opposed to how they should?

“The task of the just sovereign, whether human or divine, is to establish a system of government that protects the vulnerable.”

“One recurring theme in rabbinic discussions of wealth emphasizes the interdependence between the rich and the poor, and the ease with which wealth can turn into poverty.“

How is humanity dealing with it?

“The concept of tzedek, according to this understanding, extends beyond the basic legal requirements of the state, and beyond the execution of strict justice. Nor is tzedek a divine attribute, beyond human capacity. Again, tzedek appears as a relational term that describes a contract between God and humanity, or between humans of differing social or political status, to establish a system aimed at liberating the vulnerable from their oppressors.”

Entertaining/informative/thoughtful or some combination thereof

*The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity – Esther Perel

“In a world where it is so easy to feel insignificant—to be laid off, disposable, deleted with a click, unfriended—being chosen has taken on an importance it never had before. Monogamy is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal, for it confirms our specialness. Infidelity says, You’re not so special after all. It shatters the grand ambition of love.”

“I’m looking California and feeling Minnesota“…

I’m an armchair/amateur therapist; people who know me will probably attest to this. They tell me their problems; I listen; we talk through it. I don’t offer “advice”, but we talk through options, feelings, motivations. My approach to relationships, intimacy and human ‘mistakes’ and betrayals, in many ways, mirrors the kinds of things Esther Perel explores in this (and other) works. Yet when I’m talking to the more rigid among my acquaintances who see the world in very clear “right or wrong” binaries, I am charged with the dubious misdemeanor of “being very California”.

“As tempting as it is to reduce affairs to sex and lies, I prefer to use infidelity as a portal into the complex landscape of relationships and the boundaries we draw to bind them. Infidelity brings us face-to-face with the volatile and opposing forces of passion: the lure, the lust, the urgency, the love and its impossibility, the relief, the entrapment, the guilt, the heartbreak, the sinfulness, the surveillance, the madness of suspicion, the murderous urge to get even, the tragic denouement. Be forewarned: Addressing these issues requires a willingness to descend into a labyrinth of irrational forces. Love is messy; infidelity more so. But it is also a window, like none other, into the crevices of the human heart.”

I, like Perel, believe we must be realistic; we must be compassionate; we must listen and communicate. Regardless of what choices we make about a relationship in the wake of infidelity, we are not served, clear, being heard, getting closure (or whatever you want to call the peace or answers we seek), moving forward if we don’t deal with it. This is particularly true given the expectations we place on ourselves and on a relationship (and what we commonly think a relationship ought to give us):

“Never before have our expectations of marriage taken on such epic proportions. We still want everything the traditional family was meant to provide—security, children, property, and respectability—but now we also want our partner to love us, to desire us, to be interested in us. We should be best friends, trusted confidants, and passionate lovers to boot. The human imagination has conjured up a new Olympus: that love will remain unconditional, intimacy enthralling, and sex oh-so-exciting, for the long haul, with one person. And the long haul keeps getting longer. Contained within the small circle of the wedding band are vastly contradictory ideals. We want our chosen one to offer stability, safety, predictability, and dependability—all the anchoring experiences. And we want that very same person to supply awe, mystery, adventure, and risk. Give me comfort and give me edge. Give me familiarity and give me novelty. Give me continuity and give me surprise. Lovers today seek to bring under one roof desires that have forever had separate dwellings.”

A number of the books I have read this month (and tend to read in general) deal with the idea of novelty, and modern life’s many dissatisfactions. The more convenience, connectivity, seeming choice we have, the less content we seem to be… the more “on the hunt” we are. I’ve noticed this most particularly in the world of online dating sites/apps, where the illusion of endless choice creates the sense that one is shopping from a catalog and can simply return what s/he doesn’t find perfect. There’s always something else, something more, something different, and this sense is pervasive – even among those of us who push against these changing “norms” (can we call them that?):

“In our consumer society, novelty is key. The obsoleteness of objects is programmed in advance so that it ensures our desire to replace them. And the couple is indeed no exception to these trends. We live in a culture that continually lures us with the promise of something better, younger, perkier. Hence we no longer divorce because we’re unhappy; we divorce because we could be happier. We’ve come to see immediate gratification and endless variety as our prerogative. Previous generations were taught that life entails sacrifice.”

*Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators – Ronan Farrow

I looked forward to reading this, even though I knew it would make me unspeakably angry (it did). The lengths to which institutions will go to protect predators and the profits and status quo they represent is detailed here. I’d just say… read it.

And, yeah, Matt Lauer is way, way worse and more disgusting than I had ever imagined. The fucking criminal audacity of these men. I wish it were surprising, unusual, anomalous. But no, people like Lauer are just symptoms of a whole system that props up mediocrity, and lets it get away with anything it wants.

Coincidences

There’s nothing really ‘coincidental’ about having read these books. They share themes – epidemics/pandemics and, tangentially related, forensic ecology. All provided a lot of insight and fed my need to understand better, know more (in a broad/general sense). I know plenty of people who are avoiding all types of information because, under the circumstances, they can’t tolerate more. They will actively seek out the barest minimum, i.e. “Am I allowed to go outside? Must I wear a mask?” They don’t want more information or statistics. Therefore, reading these kinds of books, even though they don’t directly deal with the virus at hand (but do liberally mention Anthony Fauci), would be a definite “no”.

*The Nature of Life and Death: Every Body Leaves a Trace – Patricia Wiltshire

“To me, corpses have ceased to be people; they are repositories of information where nature has left clues that we might follow.”

“No, there is no life after death—but there is always life in death. When you are alive, your body is a mass of beautifully balanced ecosystems, and so it is in death. Your dead body is a rich and vibrant paradise for microbes, a bounty for scavenging insects, birds, rodents, and other animals, some of which will come to your body to feast upon your mortal remains, and some of which will come, like the tinkers and traders exploiting a “gold rush,” to prey on the scavengers themselves. And this too is of significance for a forensic ecologist—for the way a body is being broken down, the kinds of scavengers that come for it, and at what rate, can itself provide vital pieces to the puzzle of who, what, where, and how.”

*Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic – David Quammen

“To put the matter in its starkest form: Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly. There are three elements to the situation.”

“This elaborate concatenation of life-forms and sequential strategies is highly adaptive and, so far as mosquitoes and hosts are concerned, difficult to resist. It shows evolution’s power, over great lengths of time, to produce structures, tactics, and transformations of majestic intricacy. Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.”

*Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come – Richard Preston

“’This is how all outbreaks end,’ Armand Sprecher, the Doctors’ official in Brussels, said. ‘It’s always a change in behavior. Ebola outbreaks end when people decide they’re going to end.’”

This book was, strangely, a page-turner. It was dramatic, high-stakes, harrowing, sad… I can’t speak to its absolute accuracy, but I assume because it was written by a writer/journalist rather than a scientist, it has more novel-like qualities, keeping the reader invested in the characters and the ballooning scope of the disaster they faced. (And Fauci, of course, appears again.)

As a side note, I was a bit disturbed by how the following was written:

“Ever since she had been in college, Lina Moses had wanted to go up against Ebola in an outbreak. This had been her dream for years. Now it was really going to happen. It was a battle of a kind, a public health battle, and the aim was to save lives.” (weird thing to want to do – have happen).”

I have no doubt that the writer meant that this Lina Moses character wanted to face the toughest possible public health challenge, but the idea that someone would wish for an Ebola outbreak (“this had been her dream for years“!?) seems like it might have needed an editor…

Like most books of this type, it serves as an ominous warning. Written before the latest coronavirus outbreak, it cautions that these kinds of outbreaks can run rampant before we are even aware of their spread. Highly contagious, Ebola acts fast, and its symptoms are obvious and extreme. Much more extreme than the reported early symptoms of COVID-19 (and its transmissibility when carriers are asymptomatic). Preston, as writers in all such books do, shines a light on the lack of preparedness for, as we have learned, virtually all of these public health challenges.

“In other words, if the Makona strain hadn’t been stopped quickly, it would have continued improving its ability to spread in humans. It would have become yet more humanized. The world got lucky this time. If the Makona strain had raced into a poor supercity, it would have gotten into many more thousands of people, and gotten many more chances to evolve and change. For a long time after the Ebola epidemic subsided, nobody really understood just how close the world had come to a much bigger disaster.”

Biggest disappointment (or disliked)

There were a number of books in April that I felt might be really interesting, and they all disappointed, or I miscalculated. They weren’t necessarily bad, but I had higher expectations.

*How to Feed a Dictator: Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot Through the Eyes of Their Cooks – Witold Szabłowski

When will we see a chapter here to cover the eating habits and gustatory proclivities of Donald Trump as an afterword to this oddity?

*Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima – James Mahaffey

I think I expected something more gripping; something that conveyed in a more vivid way just what atomic accidents portend. Maybe I have been seduced by how well, for example, the Chernobyl story was told in televisual terms. This book was informative, but not what I was expecting or hoping for.

*Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World – Cal Newport

“I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.”

As I picked this book up, everyone around me was becoming accustomed to the confines of being in lockdown, working from home – potentially sheltering in place alone – or trapped with the entire family – in what may have started to feel like an increasingly small space for an indefinite (both in terms of length of time and the shape of the future). One of the only connections to the outside world, to friends and family, to shopping, to continued livelihood, were the same digital tools and platforms that Cal Newport urges us to reconsider our relationships with.

Maybe my ongoing hermit-like seclusion (and comfort with this) positions me to observe other people’s behaviors and reactions. Maybe prescriptive books of this nature feel unnecessarily judgmental and smug at a time like this. It’s stark right now: choosing digital minimalism was always about having the luxury to choose or not. It requires having the digital smörgåsbord to pick and choose from in the first place. We see more clearly than ever the digital divide when we are involuntarily disconnected physically. Who has the privilege and power to decide whether their kids will be able to go on doing some form of online learning when schools are closed? Who is welcome in the digital/knowledge economy, able to work from home?

In light of our current environment, this book rubbed me the wrong way.

That said, my questions from the introductory part of this write-up poking into identity and personality do tie to one of the central tenets of this book: what are your values? This book asks whether, and how, technology serves those values?

“Once we view these personal technology processes through the perspective of diminishing returns, we’ll gain the precise vocabulary we need to understand the validity of the second principle of minimalism, which states that optimizing how we use technology is just as important as how we choose what technologies to use in the first place.”

*Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams – Matthew Walker

“Accepting that our lack of sleep is a slow form of self-euthanasia, what can be done about it?”

I don’t know many people who are good sleepers. Insomnia, interrupted sleep, sleep disorders and constant exhaustion (as well as the repeated complaint, often multiple times a day, “I’m so tired”) plague everyone I know. I’m lucky in that I don’t have any such problems, but I wanted to learn more about sleep and had heard that this book was, for lack of a more dazzling word, “great”.

But the fact is, despite the dizzying amount of research conducted on the subject… stunningly little is truly understood for certain about sleep. Sleep offers all manner of benefits for the body and brain, and lack of it is dire for health, upping risk factors for various diseases and disorders. I came to this book hoping for more certainty as to why these things are the case, only to learn that there are no definitive answers. I don’t think I really believed the book would actually “unlock” anything as its title promises. But I hoped for something beyond the “why” (i.e., sleep is healthy; sleep helps you form and retain memories, etc.). I wanted the why behind the why (why is sleep healthy? Why and how does sleep work to empower or enfeeble memory-making?).

The only thing that really piqued my interest was the discussion on the human’s intentional daily routine of “premature and artificial termination of sleep”:

“Compare the physiological state of the body after being rudely awakened by an alarm to that observed after naturally waking from sleep. Participants artificially wrenched from sleep will suffer a spike in blood pressure and a shock acceleration in heart rate caused by an explosive burst of activity from the fight-or-flight branch of the nervous system. Most of us are unaware of an even greater danger that lurks within the alarm clock: the snooze button. If alarming your heart, quite literally, were not bad enough, using the snooze feature means that you will repeatedly inflict that cardiovascular assault again and again within a short span of time. Step and repeat this at least five days a week, and you begin to understand the multiplicative abuse your heart and nervous system will suffer across a life span.”

*Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion – Jia Tolentino

“I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.”

I found myself underwhelmed by Trick Mirror, and again, I think I found it unsatisfying in part because of what society is experiencing right now. It feels indulgent to examine some of the questions Tolentino and the aforementioned Cal Newport spend time obsessing about. Sure, they did all of this in another time – not that long ago, but it may as well have been years – when segments of the population were concerned about the ways in which online/internet life warps our realities, our identities, creating an artificial and commoditized version of ourselves, a shallow but still multi-sided illusion showing different faces to different groups of people while only data brokers and analytics tools (think they) know who we really are.

“Selfhood buckles under the weight of this commercial importance. In physical spaces, there’s a limited audience and time span for every performance. Online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end. (You can essentially be on a job interview in perpetuity.) In real life, the success or failure of each individual performance often plays out in the form of concrete, physical action.”

In that sense, Tolentino’s themes are timely. But most of what she has written here feels like it’s been written before, and better, by other people, so hers is a regurgitative exercise of sorts. I wanted to see something new, but there wasn’t much here lighting my mind on fire.

However, credit where credit is due. Tolentino cites Erving Goffman‘s work on theory of identity:

“a person must put on a sort of performance, create an impression for an audience. The performance might be calculated, as with the man at a job interview who’s practiced every answer; it might be unconscious, as with the man who’s gone on so many interviews that he naturally performs as expected; it might be automatic, as with the man who creates the correct impression primarily because he is an upper-middle-class white man with an MBA. A performer might be fully taken in by his own performance—he might actually believe that his biggest flaw is “perfectionism”—or he might know that his act is a sham. But no matter what, he’s performing. Even if he stops trying to perform, he still has an audience, his actions still create an effect. “All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify,” Goffman wrote.”

This might not have hit me as hard as it did had I not also watched a deeply affecting video of Sterling K. Brown, in response to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, talking about the masks black men wear every day as they go out into the world and are always performing, always being someone else. While Tolentino’s book and analysis address these identity questions in an almost sterile way, e.g., digital personas that e-commerce retailers create to market more effectively.

But it’s much more powerful to apply Goffman’s “All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify”. Without being constantly reminded by a Sterling K. Brown, or the seemingly endless string of tragic, horrifying, senseless, unjustifiable deaths of black people, is anyone thinking actively about the crucial ways in which the world is not a stage – but reality, life, in which living, breathing people cannot leave their homes without feeling like this might be the day that, despite my mask, I don’t get to come home again?